Looking through my grandpa's old union book from the 70s

I was cleaning out the garage and found his Local 29 pay scale sheet from 1974. It said the top rate was $8.75 an hour. I checked online and that's like over $60 an hour today. It just hit me how much the buying power for our work has changed. Anyone else have old papers that show how different things were?

3 comments

3 Comments

jakeb813d agoMost Upvoted

My grandma's grocery list from 1990 is a time capsule. Ground beef was 99 cents a pound, a gallon of milk was under two bucks. I found it taped inside a cookbook. My own receipt from last week for the same basic stuff looked like a ransom note. I just stood there in my kitchen holding both papers, feeling like I'd failed some basic life test.

jana8813d ago

Found my dad's old tax return from 1985... his factory job paid enough that my mom didn't have to work and we still owned a house. That's just impossible now on one income. It feels like the whole deal got rewritten while we weren't looking. The money we get for our time just doesn't go as far anymore. Makes you wonder where all that extra value from our work is actually going.

susan_adams3d ago

Read an article that called it wage suppression. Companies kept raising prices and profits while pay just flatlined for decades. Makes you wonder who really won.